Hello evvvveryone,
As @tonfilm suggested, I had worked on a similar case and have created the tools you can find in the following link:
Kinect2Studio.zip (2.9 MB)
From my experience the MainLoop freeze effect happens mostly when there is no enabled Kinect (2) node in the patch. If you add a Kinect node while a device is connected, enable the node, and leave it in the patch, you are even capable of disconnecting the device and keep on playing and changing .xef files.
@elias and myself spent a good couple of days looking into why this freeze happens and it seems to be related to the system wide event handling mechanism, and the way in which vvvv uses it, and the fact that KinectStudio seems to be tampering with it as well. It was low level Windows stuff that was over my head, perhaps @elias could shed some light.
As for the patch I provide here, it is an alpha version at most, so please excuse all the bugs and quirks it may come with. You need to have KinectStudio installed on the default location for the references to work. If the freeze starts to happen, reload the Kinect node and make sure it is enabled before trying again. If that does not work, close and try again.
If you feel like it, the VS code includes Pause functionality and some other stuff which seemed to always cause the freeze, so it was commented out for now.
Hopefully this can help.
Cheers.